Peter Jameson. Gilbert Frankau
an old school friend, John Gordon (who may have had ulterior motives in granting the facilities), a little room in the big, dingy offices of Gordon’s Limited, General Merchants, he imported another consignment of Havana cigars; had them sampled; hired a brougham; and hawked (he was, although he had married an officer’s daughter, by no means a snob) his sample-boxes round the West End tobacconist shops until he had disposed of his second shipment at a very different figure to that received on the first.
So began the firm of “P. Jameson & Company, Cigar Importers,” which—aided by the financial support of John Gordon (who married Dolores Bradley very shortly after that second shipment had been disposed of) and the boom-crop of 1884—soon needed offices of its own, two clerks, a country salesman, and all the paraphernalia of a regular business. It was not, of course—never would be—a huge affair like Gordon’s, who dealt the world over and in every conceivable commodity from quinine to molasses—still it was a solid, money-making, not too arduous concern; and, moreover, both Peter’s father and his salesman, Tom Simpson, whom he subsequently took into junior partnership, needed considerably less to live on than the profit which it earned.
§ 3
Peter the Third, our Mr. Jameson, was not born until his parents had been married nearly four years: John Gordon’s son, Francis, antedating him by about a week. In both of them, you can trace the Miraflores strain fairly clearly. They are both of them of medium height; stocky rather than tall. Both have the same curious eyes which seem to change colour—from gray to darkest black—with their thoughts. Both are small-handed, small-footed, rather determined about the nose, dark-haired, intelligent-headed. But life—and war, which is the same thing—has dealt with them so differently that, nowadays, you would have great difficulty in finding more than a fugitive likeness. You would say, and perhaps rightly, that Peter is less, Francis more, the Miraflores.
Dolores Gordon, despite her husband’s twelve thousand a year, presented him with no more children; but Tessa Jameson had another son—Peter’s brother Arthur—born in 1888.
Meanwhile, both businesses flourished: Gordon’s Limited, the larger; Jameson & Co., the sounder—providing John Gordon with a rather elaborate mansion in Curzon Street, West (to which he would return, late, tired and neurotic from the new offices in London Wall), and the Jamesons with a solid, rather tyrannous edifice in Lowndes Square, Kensington, wherein Peter’s father found comfortable refuge from the reflector-lit warehouse in Lime Street. By the late nineties, Peter the First’s few thousand pounds had grown—thanks largely to the sole agency for Beckmann cigars (of which more later)—into a fairly comfortable fortune, so that when John Gordon suggested to Peter the Second that both Peter the Third and Francis Gordon had better be sent to Eton College, money did not stand in the way.
The two cousins (Peter’s brother Arthur went to a less exalted establishment) did not distinguish themselves greatly at school. Francis was rather too flamboyant, Peter too self-concentrated, for easy friendships. However, Peter managed to get both his “Boats,” his “House Colours,” and Corporal’s stripes on his Volunteer tunic before he left: while Francis undoubtedly acquired there—in some mysterious way of his own—the beginnings of that literary technique in which he is now beginning to be acknowledged past-master.
From Eton, Peter went straight into the business. He had always found idleness intolerable, and Jameson’s seemed—regarded as “something to do”—made to his hand. To Francis and other Etonian acquaintances, the choice appeared an amazing one: but the boy’s father—lonely since his wife’s death about a year before, and conscious that his other son Arthur, whatever else he might become, would never be a business man—both understood and stimulated this desire for work.
§ 4
Peter’s entry into Jameson’s, early in 1903, synchronized with the formation of the Havana Tobacco Company—commonly known as “The Trust”; and the attempt by J. B. Duke and his colleagues (who, having fought the English cigarette and tobacco manufacturers to a standstill, were now controlling—almost unknown to the public—eighty per cent. of the world’s smoking-trade) to corner the market in Havana-manufactured cigars. Though a very small affair of outposts when considered in relation to the pitched battles which preceded it, the fight was, at the outset, not without interest to those whose livings were menaced by the billion-dollar corporation controlled from 111 Fifth Avenue, New York. To the boy, fresh from the monastic atmosphere of school, it gave just that touch of romance which his enthusiasm needed.
For Jameson’s—as agents of the German-owned but Havana-domiciled concern, Heinrich Beckmann & Co—lined up with the so-called “Independents,” and did doughty battle with tongue and typewriter against the invader.
Old Jameson and Tom Simpson, who, by now, had a fourth share in the concern, found the lad’s keenness amusing. Both elderly men—their capital intact and their blood chilled with twenty years of money-making—they did not take the situation very seriously. Even when Beckmanns, greedy for more trade, insisted that both “Beresford & Beresford” and “Samuel Elkins & Co.” should (under certain secret conditions) receive direct shipments of their goods, they only laughed tolerantly at the infringement of a profitable monopoly—leaving indignation to the newcomer.
Indignant, Peter certainly was. There had never been an actual contract about the Beckmann brand; but the boy, accustomed to his college code, perceived something in the transaction dishonourable to the other side, weak on his own. Unreasonably as it seemed at the time—reasonably enough as it shows in the light of history—he thus early conceived an instinctive distrust, not only of Beckmanns, but of German business people in general. …
However, a year in the City effectively replaced the college code by the legal.
At the end of eighteen months—the “fight” resolving itself into a mere question of strong competition; each side more or less holding its own, with a slight sentimental balance in favour of those outside “the Ring”—Peter had settled down to the complacent routine of office life: ten till five, with an hour off for lunch and two Saturdays out of three absolutely workless. Sport—he was a safe shot, except at snipe for which he lacked the temperament; a good rider; and a really fine hand with the trout-fly—completed his existence. Dissipation, after one or two, experiments, he avoided—not from scruples, but because it bored him.
Then, just after his twenty-first birthday, the “old man,” never very strong, caught pneumonia and died within the week.
§ 5
The death of his father was a vivid grief to Peter. For his mother, he had never experienced more than a lukewarm affection; Arthur had always been her favourite, and Peter—even as a child—had been conscious of the preference. But the “governor,” the “old boy!”—that seemed somehow or other different. They had worked together, talked together, driven home together, drank their port of an evening at the big mahogany table in the Lowndes Square dining-room, had their little rows, made them up again. … “Sentimental ass!” the boy said to himself, as he sat alone in the library that first night. But there were real tears in his eyes; tears that only work could dry.
And of work, in the days that followed, there was enough. As co-executor, with Simpson, for his father’s estate, even Peter found himself sufficiently occupied. The business, the Crown lease of the Lowndes Square house, sundry outside investments—all required valuation, tabulation, preparation for probate. Death duties, auditor’s fees, lawyer’s fees—each had to be scrutinized, queried, and ultimately overpaid. Arthur—who, at seventeen, was already wearied